Satellite images show North Korean mountain after nuclear test that could collapse and unleash an environmental disaster

North
Korean leader Kim Jong Un provides guidance on a nuclear weapons
program in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean
Central News AgencyThomson
Reuters

North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb that Japan estimates had
ten times the explosive power of the bomb the US dropped on
Hiroshima on Sunday, and now satellite imagery shows how it
devastated a mountain which scientists say could be on the verge
of collapse.

The estimated 160 kiloton explosion deep under
the Punggye-ri mountain in North Korea visibly shook and
shifted the earth.

"We call it 'taking the roof off,'" Wen Lianxing, the lead
geophysicist at the University of Science and Technology of China
in Hefei, told the South China
Morning Post. "If the mountain collapses and the hole is
exposed, it will let out many bad things."

Nuclear detonations release radioactive material that can stay in
the environment for decades. It can cause cancer spread far and
wide as what's known as fallout.

In the pictures below, see how the mountain looked before, and
after the massive nuclear blast in satellite images taken by
Planet Labs and provided by 38 North, a website for informed
analysis of North Korea.